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About Us

Sobriquet Magazine was born in
1995, as a punk rock fanzine. Over the years, the magazine
has evolved from your average photocopy-and-staples rag to
the webzine you see today. The focus of the publication,
too, has expanded. Whereas Sobriquet was initially
all punk rock, we are now, as our front page proudly
proclaims, "an independent journal of literature, film,
music, and ideas," though our devotion to punk rock and
independent music has never wavered.

In 2000, after ten paper issues,
Sobriquet moved entirely online, in large part to keep
maintenance costs down while maximizing the publication's
readership. This move was not an easy one, as the primitive
nature of some of our
older pages shows. Still, we stuck it out, pulled
Sobriquet along with us through graduate school (or,
maybe, it pulled us through graduate school) and somehow
ended up with a website that was featured on
MSNBC's Connected
Coast to Coast and which has had several essays
selected for syndication in newspapers nationwide. Pretty
good for a zine that sold 22 copies of its first issue.

In 2006, the Library of Congress of
the United States officially recognized Sobriquet and
awarded us the following ISSN number: 1930-1820. Now--for
those of you academically-inclined folks, at least--you can
find Sobriquet listed in WorldCat, though its just as
likely you'll end up here via a Google or Yahoo! search.

Today, Sobriquet publishes
high-quality writing on a variety of subjects ranging from
contemporary literature and theory to punk rock to film and
academia. We have had Oxford and Harvard-educated professors
write for us and we have had essays written by kids educated
on the streets of London and New York The key, as always, is
to be a good writer and have something worthwhile to say.

Our current areas of interest are,
among others, contemporary fiction, existentialism, punk
rock and D.I.Y. subcultures, academia, and cinema. As
always, we appreciate writing that is thoughtfully critical
of the world around us. Healthy skepticism is fundamental to
the Sobriquet mentality. However, we are not--and have
never been--interested in conspiracy theories or
unsubstantiated claims about government cover-ups. We
welcome academic writing, but not writing that is
excessively abstruse. In other words, if you sound like
Derrida or Spivak, you may want to find another place to
publish your work.

Now, speaking of publishing your work,
Sobriquet cannot pay contributors for their writing.
Contributors keep the copyright for their work and we give
full credit for all submissions we decide to publish. You
may reprint articles written for Sobriquet if A) you
wrote it and B) you credit us as the first place you
published the work in question.